Our church is completing Monvee, a spiritual growth program, and I’ve been one of the small group facilitators. At a recent meeting, I asked the group what they’d have to sacrifice to reach their desired spiritual goal. It turned into a challenging, spirited discussion.
Someone eventually confessed what many in the group felt: Were they really willing to make the necessary sacrifices to personally grow spiritually?
- Wake up at 4:30 AM to study the Bible before work
- Devote consistent, quality time to prayer
- Commit to a small, accountability group
- Watch less TV
- Spend less time on social media
- Devote more time to serving others and volunteering
The discussion kept bringing me back to writing. How often you’ll hear a writer bemoan their station in life, children, career, health, lack of finances, or personal quirks, as an excuse for not pursuing their dream. And the question often comes back to the one we discussed that night: Do we really want it? Are we really willing to make the necessary sacrifices to pursue professional publication?
And oftentimes, the answer is NO. We don’t WANT to make the necessary sacrifices.
- We don’t WANT to wake up early or stay up late to write
- We don’t WANT to spend less time with our family and friends
- We don’t WANT to blog more
- We don’t WANT to develop our computer skills
- We don’t WANT to have our work critiqued
- We don’t WANT to endure rejection
- We don’t WANT to write query letters
- We don’t WANT to go to conferences and meet other writers
- We don’t WANT to wait on agents or editors
- We don’t WANT to cram writing into every possible opening in our schedule
Translation: We don’t want to make the necessary sacrifices.
I have a bit of a confession here.
When I left the ministry, I kind of wandered spiritually. I worked construction but had no inspirational outlet. It was a pretty bland, unsatisfying existence, that left my creative constitution screaming. Along the way, I became immersed in computer games. World building games, first person shooter games, fantasy role-playing games. They consumed hours of my free time. Hours and hours and hours. I pondered strategies, joined chat rooms, downloaded maps, studied cheats, even made my own maps. But at the end of the day, I felt like I was just killing time.
Through a series of events (which stemmed mainly from my discontent), I realized I finally had to do something with my life. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) I had talents and gifts that were being squandered. The problem wasn’t with computer games, the problem was with me. Again, through a series of circumstances, I became aware of a national writing contest and decided to enter. It was the first such contest I’d ever entered. After receiving an Honorable Mention, I felt like I had confirmation.
I should think about devoting more time to writing. In fact, I should try to do this professionally.
The catch was obvious — I would have to give up something. And it was pretty obvious what that something was.
I can still remember the day I deleted all the computer games from my PC and put the disks in the drawer. That was about six years ago. I haven’t played those games since I decided to start writing. Not one of them. Sure, I’ve been tempted. (And, for the record, I do play Words with Friends and Angry Birds on my tablet.) But if I was going to get serious about writing, something would have to change. So I changed it.
Question: Have you made the necessary sacrifices to pursue your writing dreams? What have you given up — or what should you give up — to reach your writing goals?
To me, the key isn’t making sacrifices, it’s cracking the magic of time. When I’m at the day job, every minute is like 5 hours. When I’m not at work, every minute is like 5 seconds.
If I could figure out how to reverse that and stretch the off time, it’d work a lot better. 😎
Seriously though, this is a tough quandary. I have literally tracked how I spend my time and except for my hour a week present to myself of watching Hawaii Five-0, I am using up every minute toward my writing career (and trying to keep myself alive in the process).
This industry is designed to tie you in knots–if you don’t spend time on publishing related blogs or otherwise absorbing industry news, you’re not working hard enough to stay informed. If you don’t visit fellow authors’ blogs, you’re not being supportive. If you don’t learn how to design websites/social media/all the latest greatest marketing tools, you’re not doing enough to please yourself or your publisher. If you don’t churn out X number of books a year, you’re not writing fast enough.
Yep, you need to make sacrifices. But what you need more desperately in this business is perspective.
Ahhhh…. Here’s the rub. That old four-letter word: w-o-r-k.
It’s not so much a sacrifice as substitution. The question is do you want one marshmallow now, or two later?
Good post, Mike.
Now I’ve got to go delete all my computer games.
I actually find computer games handy when my brain’s “fried” creatively, but I have a rule: if I find I’m playing the game instead of doing what I’m supposed to be doing, or if I bounce right on my computer immediately after getting up in the morning to play the game some more, it’s time to go cold turkey. I’m addicted.
If that means I delete the game from my computer while I’m in recovery mode, so be it, but I’ve found I only had to do it once. After the headache I went through recovering my game unlock codes, I’ve found that just thinking “Okay, can’t play this again until X, or I’ll have to delete it,” is enough to warn me off.
I also don’t play the games all the time, just every so often in cycles when I need a creative mental break. They’ve actually triggered some stories. (The dream that combined an MMORPG I play with a story world of mine was weird, but the story in that dream actually helped me patch an information hole I was missing.)
The games sure are nice when I’m sick.
*sighs* Sorry, I was trying to write a fast answer and got distracted by the video game reference.
I’ve given up time. I don’t crochet, knit, or read nearly as often as I once did. The gaming doesn’t really count, because I didn’t start until after I got my first computer, which was after I was already writing.
Thanks for sharing this. Hubby and I stepped down from 13 years as founding senior pastors in July and we’re both experiencing that strange feeling of wandering and killing time. Helps to know someone else has gone through the same and come out all right.
Niki, that transition was pretty difficult for me. I didn’t have a lot of marketable skills and when I went back to construction, I was just haunted by a need for something more. I don’t mean to imply that secular vocations cannot be meaningful, but that I personally knew I’d not finished the race set out for me. Godspeed to you and your husband.
Yes, I have in many ways. Getting up early, ministry, working out, writing, reading…it’s all meticulously balanced so I can accomplish something. Prayer happens all of the time and reading the bible is something I need to still work on, and you’re right…I’m not nearly as peaceful or as creative unless I fit in my Bible time.
So far I have a pretty active writing life, however I have to make changes that’ll help in the long run. There are just too many to list here, but in a nutshell I need less computer time and more me and God time.
I notice my soul gets hollow and cheap if I slack off on Bible/Prayer time.
And as a former missionary/pastor myself, I understand that “detached” feeling completely. Writing helped fill the vacuum.
Good discussion Mike, thanks for your honesty. I know I’ve given up lots of sleep and TV for the most part (besides college football & the occasional Netflix show.) But that’s a great trade b/c now I hate turning on the TV randomly because it just wastes time.
A couple other things I’ve really had to scale back on is commenting on blogs and answering emails. There are dozens of blogs – including many of the blogs hosted by commenters on this site — I’d love to comment on more. Also I’ve found myself waiting days to return someone’s email. I’ve likened it to triage, addressing only the most urgent.
Great truth here! Just read an article by Seth Godin. Let me add his two-cents: “Until we’re honest with ourselves about what we’re going to master, there’s no chance we’ll accomplish it.”
Thanks for the continued encouragement to weed out the unnecessary and focus on the essential! God bless!
Great post! One thing I’ve been trying to do is write without an internet connection. l appreciated all the comments here about how flooded we are with social media and the need to be up to date with industry information. I’m still learning the ropes, but I also feel greedy about quality writing time. (Also, years ago I used to be horribly addicted to the game Civilization until I deleted it from my computer too!)
Biggest thing is TV. Lot of great shows I want to watch that are on AFTER 9:00. Problem is, to get up every morning at 3 AM to write, I need to be in bed by then, heading toward sleep. It really came down to a simple question: which do I love more? This show, or writing?
The rewards have gone far beyond just writing. I barely watch television at all, anymore. Even in the middle of the day, like now….after school, no one’s home yet…so after this blog, I’ll go read, and just leave the television off.
I think most of us find ourselves in this ‘time’ quandary. I’m not sure if I could squeeze in any more focused time than I am already. Our brains need a certain amount of ‘down time’. Perhaps I could cut out some TV watching, but I’m not a big TV watcher anyway and i don’t play video games.
I do admire people who rise early to reach their goal, be it to pray more or write more or whatever it is. I love my bed in the morning, so this is one I struggle with …
Thanks for sharing some of your own struggle Mike.
Great article. I’m a writer who has made the sacrifices that you list above. But what is hard for me is that, when the books are still unpublished, what to do next? To me, that is the real difficulty. I’ve thrown my hat into the ring of self-publishing, and now I’m trying to figure out a world (social networking) that I’ve largely stayed away from. I found this article/blog via twitter. It’s amazing how many people are out here doing the same thing. Inspiring article and it has given me the gumption to keep searching for more like-minded people on twitter et. al. Thanks.
We really do need to calculate the cost of writing & following Christ. I’ve given up TV all together (this is our 7th year without TV). Still I need to be intentional about the rest of my time. Blogging/social media can steel away from other writing projects & family time. Thanks for reminding us to calculate the cost of writing & following Christ. BLESSINGS!
Great post. Thank you for sharing. As a new, fledgling writer, I find myself often confused. I know I need to write, write, write; yet, according to all the professionals out there, I also need to be ‘building my platform’, ‘growing my tribe’, ‘finding my niche’, following the latest in publishing trends, continue to read, read, read great works of literature and the list goes on and on and on. Like many others who’ve commented, writing isn’t my ‘day job’. It’s my ‘in-between my real-life’ job.
And yet, there are a couple things I could sacrifice – or at least keep in their respective place, not allowing them to spill into precious writing time: 1) set a specific time of day for cyber-space work and stick to the time-limit. 2) Create a habit of writing EVERY morning, and not just SOME mornings after my bible/prayer time. 3) Set a schedule where at least 2-3 afternoons a week I make an appt. with myself to write (no matter what ‘real-life’ task is calling my name).
I already write on weekends and in-between ‘real-life’ times… however, I’m not always disciplined to get off the social networking sites or consistently write around the same time every morning or afternoon.
Thanks again. Great encouragement/conviction : )